Friday, November 18, 2011

Montage #31: World War II / La Deuxième Guerre Mondiale

This montage is no longer be available on Pod-O-Matic. It can be heard or downloaded from the Internet Archive at the following address / Ce montage n'est plus disponible en baladodiffusion Pod-O-Matic. Il peut être téléchargé ou entendu au site Internet Archive à l'adresse suivante:

Our final montage of this mini-series will now look at music composed around the time of or is inspired by events of World War II. As we did two weeks ago, here is a YouTube clip of "popular music" of the era

Music of the Stage and Screen

William Walton composed the music for the motion picture The First of the Few in May and June of 1942. At the end of 1942 he extracted and arranged the Spitfire Prelude and Fugue.It is a rousing piece of music, full of the energy and sense of heroism you would expect for a war-inspired piece.

Composer John WIlliams served in the USAF from 1952-55, and provided numerous memorable scores to war epics (Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List come immediately to mind). Both of these Spielberg movies won popular and critical acclaim, but the music WIlliams wrote for the latter film stands out, with its memorable violin laments (originally played by Itzhak Perlman for the film soundtrack).

Richard Rodgers makes our montage twice this week. First, for his setting of Oscar Hammerstein's lyrics in their stage adaptation of the James A. Michener novel Tales of the South Pacific. The chorus I chose, There is Nothing Like a Dame, is one of the most memorable (and funny) songs from the musical.

After the war, Rodgers was approached by the NBC television network to score their epic television documentaryVictory at Sea. In that particular case, I must give equal billing and credit to Rodgers' long-time associate and arranger, Robert Russell Bennett, who took short piano themes (twelve of them) and turned them into a mammoth 13-hour score, conducting the NBC Symphony (the same outfit, rebranded the RCA Symphony) was then taken to the studio to record at least two sets of LPs of the music, including a suite (sometimes called the Victory at Sea Symphonic Scennario). The performance I chose, by Sergiu Commissionna and the Houston Symphony, features a handful of the more memorable Rodgers vignettes brilliantly orchestrated by Bennett.

Russian Symphonies

Although there have been several large scale orchestral works that were inspired by moments of the War, the retinue of Soviet composers that were trapped in their homeland during that time stand out as the strongest of the lot. We are fortunate that both of the Soviet giants of the ear, Prokoofiev and Shostakovich, put pen to paper during these difficult circumstances, and delivered the best one-two punch of symphonies (like Nielsen and Sibelius did thirty or so years earlier during the other conflict) that depict human perseverance and triumph over the inhumanity of war. Prokofiev;s op. 100 symphony and Shostakovich's Leningrad symphony make the montage, with complete YouTube performances embedded here (Prokofiev) and in the French commentary (Shostakovich).

Odes to Tragedy

To complete the montage, two selections that stand as odes to tragedy, sacrifice and the casualties of war: Britten's War Requiem and Penderecki's Tremody for Hiroshima.

In both instances, the music evokes sacrifice and, to some extent, the gratuity of death. Britten's work requires mammoth forces, and uses both the traditional Latin Requiem text and poems in English to make his point. The Sanctus is an especially moving section.

The Penderecki is a modern-sounding work, which in its own acerbic style eloquently makes deplores the loss of innocent lives, "collateral damage" being the PC term, as a result of the first ever use of nuclear warfare in a conflict.